In conventional business warehouse systems, reports may be generated based on a single query of a business warehouse database. Such reports may be rendered according to a standard that is typically inflexible and difficult to use. Moreover, the layout and content of the reports may be limited by parameters associated with a particular data provider that has generated the data stored in the business warehouse database.
An example of a report is a table of columns and rows in which the intersection of one column and one row defines a cell that includes one object of data from a query. The format of such tables is usually predefined (e.g., lines are one color, text is another color, and the background of the cells is yet another color). Changes to such a format usually may only be made globally for the report.
A table report may be provided as a spreadsheet, such as an Excel spreadsheet for example. The format of a spreadsheet table is typically programmed for each report, thus the entire formatting is easy to lose, and must be reprogrammed for each report generated. Users may only influence formatting such as colors, font size, or font type by tools such as a Web Template Stylesheet. Web-based report layouts may typically only be changed via a table interface or XML item, which requires ABAP or Javascript programming skills.